Top Book Blogs 07/2018

“When I ask him why he likes something, it’s a perverse exercise less to gain new insight than to trick him into admitting to his personality.” For Longreads, Dead Girls writer Alice Bolin tries to understand her father through the (sometimes misogynistic) mystery novels he reads(Jul 1, 2018)

[The Millions] Twelve Angry Women

“And this is a story about what women can do to each other—why women are cruel to each other, why women don’t reach down and help each other.” In conversation for Vanity Fair, Megan Abbott and Gillian Flynn talk about female rage, #MeToo, and Sharp Objects, the HBO series based on(Jul 1, 2018)

[Book Forum] PAPER TRAIL: David Lynch and Donald Trump: A Comparison

Joy Press, author of Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television, has written a new piece for Vanity Fair about novelists’ shifting attitudes toward writing for TV. They used to scoff at the prospect, but now most writers dream of writing for the small screen. “If you eavesdrop(Jul 2, 2018)

[Guardian Books Blog] Poem of the week: Us by Zaffar Kunial

An only apparently informal riff on an only apparently straightforward concept of identity finds some sparky complications Us If you ask me, us takes in undulations –each wave in the sea, all insides compressed –as if, from one coast, you could reach out to Related: Poem of the week: Typewriter(Jul 2, 2018)

[The Millions] Baby Steps All the Way: Making the Time to Write a Book

Track practice. An hour and a half. A metal picnic table. Cold enough for hats and gloves, hot enough for shorts and flip-flops. Other parents talking about football and summer camps and the new high school. Tennis practice. Second-story bleachers. Other parents scattered around, looking at phones(Jul 2, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: After Anthony Kennedy

Presidents under the cloud of investigation should not get to pick the judges who may preside over their cases(Jul 2, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Abolish ICE?

The Trump administration has replaced family separation with indefinite family detention(Jul 2, 2018)

[Guardian Books Blog] Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of themAre you on Instagram? Then you can be featured here by tagging your books-related posts with #GuardianBooksScroll down for our favourite literary linksRead more Tips, links and suggestions blogsWelcome to this week’s blog.(Jul 2, 2018)

After her aging father takes a life-threatening fall, Penelope Grand returns to her childhood hometown of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, to keep a closer watch on him. She finds both her father and her neighborhood much changed. He’s become withdrawn and wistful, and the Bed-Stuy she knew is disappearing(Jul 2, 2018)

[Guardian Books Blog] Unholy matrimony! Who spoiled Batman's wedding?

Bat-fans are upset that the New York Times has leaked details of DC’s forthcoming marriage edition, but the paper may not be the villain here It’s the wedding of the year, at least in the world of comics. This Wednesday, in the much anticipated 50th issue of Batman, the DC Universe’s most(Jul 2, 2018)

[Book Forum] MISCELLANEOUS: The Man Without a Nation

The one activity that was perhaps the most stable part of my identity that first semester was the seminar I was taking with Ehsaan Ali. His class Colonial Encounters was held on Friday afternoons. The seminar participants required his special permission to join.(Jul 2, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: World Cup you might have missed

The World Cup shows how money and media saturation have changed the nature of fandom(Jul 2, 2018)

Out this week: How to Be Famous by Caitlin Moran; The World Is a Narrow Bridge by Aaron Thier; Can You Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young; The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness by Graham Caveney; and What to Read and Why by Francine Prose. Want to learn more about upcoming titles?(Jul 3, 2018)

Whether it wins this month’s Golden Man Booker prize remains to be seen, but the popular vote here has gone to an underrated classicPenelope Lively’s Moon Tiger has won the vote for your favourite Booker winner and will be our reading group choice for this month. I love this book. It’s a fine(Jul 3, 2018)

In response to the Nobel Prize’s hiatus due to sexual misconduct at the Swedish Academy, The Guardian reports that “more than 100 Swedish writers, actors, journalists and other cultural figures have formed the New Academy, which will hand out its own award this autumn.” In a statement, the(Jul 3, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Trump’s Supreme Court

The Supreme Court is on the ballot in every federal election(Jul 3, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Angry in America

Trump is like a drug dealer who has addicted his followers to fear and rage(Jul 3, 2018)

[The Millions] The Problem with Patriotism: A Critical Look at Collective Identity in the U.S. and Germany

1. In 1984, George Orwell’s year of looming dystopia, I received an academic scholarship to study fine arts and moved to Germany, a country that had embodied modern dystopia to an unprecedented degree. The scholarship, awarded to students of the United States and the United Kingdom, had been(Jul 3, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Re-imagining the labor movement

What if the absence of strong unions is at the heart of much of what has gone wrong?(Jul 3, 2018)

Supreme Court is now Trump’s, and so we grieve for America(Jul 4, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Of American history

Americans have such different memories(Jul 4, 2018)

[The Millions] Must-Read Poetry: July 2018

Here are six notable books of poetry publishing in July. A Memory of the Future by Elizabeth Spires A book worthy of pondering—“how to find myself / when a self is so small”—Spires offers so many questions and considerations, yet they all return to our fleeting existences. “If my heart(Jul 5, 2018)

The 2018 Caine Prize for African Writing has been awarded to Makena Onjerika for her short story “Fanta Blackcurrant. A graduate of New York University’s MFA program, Onjerika now lives in Kenya where she is working on a novel. At Granta, Sheila Heti and Tao Lin interview each other about their(Jul 5, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Trump’s ineptitude

Has the American presidency become overwhelmed by its ever-expanding powers?(Jul 5, 2018)

[Salon Books] OCD isn’t about being a neat freak: The myth of a “good” mental disorder needs to end

People with OCD like author Lily Bailey are making new narratives to replace the damaging “quirky neat freak” trope(Jul 5, 2018)

[The Millions] Shining and Whole: In Remembrance of Donald Hall

Wandering the aisles made of beige steel and unrememberable carpet that was the poetry section of my local suburban library, I waited for poetry to come to me. What arrived was The Painted Bed, a collection by Donald Hall. I could’ve opened it to any poem. The title poem. “After Three Years”(Jul 6, 2018)

[Book Forum] DAILY REVIEW: Met Cute

Keith Hernandez's baseball memoir.(Jul 6, 2018)

[Book Forum] DAILY REVIEW: The Overstory by Richard Powers

Richard Powers’s latest novel seems like a response to the call for serious fiction of the Anthropocene. Focusing on the 1990s “timber wars” in California’s redwood forests, The Overstory treats the idea of agency as a collective one, and depicts the human realm as inextricable from the(Jul 6, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Scott Pruitt is gone

The Environmental Protection Agency in the early Trump administration(Jul 6, 2018)

[Book Forum] PAPER TRAIL: Priscilla Gilman on criticism in the age of social media